Fair Use: Please note that use of the Netcraft site is
subject to our Fair Use and Copyright policies. For more information,
please visit http://www.netcraft.com/about-netcraft/fair-use-copyright/,
or email info@netcraft.com.

In the February 2015 survey we received responses from
883,419,935 sites and 5,135,229 web-facing
computers.

Microsoft showed the largest growth in terms of hostnames, with an additional
12 million sites taking its total up to 253 million. This has increased
Microsoft's market share to 28.7%, but Apache continues to lead with a 38.8%
share, despite a loss of 5.9 million sites.

Web-facing computer growth was fairly even across the board, with the top
three server vendors all showing similar gains. nginx made the largest gain of
just under 22,000 computers, while Microsoft and Apache each gained just
over 20,000. This has resulted in nginx's market share growing slightly to
11.3%, but Apache maintains its comfortable lead with a 47.2% share, while
Microsoft's stays at 29.9%.

Despite its impending lack of support, the number of hostnames using
Microsoft IIS 6.0 grew by more than 5% this month; however, the number of web-facing
computers using this platform fell by 2%. This version of IIS was
released more than 10 years ago, alongside Windows Server 2003, both of which
will reach the end of their Extended Support periods in July.

Several of the new generic top-level domains continue to show surprising
growth. The number of sites using the .xyz TLD nearly doubled
this month, and now totals more than 10 million. Strong growth was also seen by
the .red TLD, which grew by nearly 3,000% to reach a total of
850,000. Other new colour-based gTLDs to have appeared in Netcraft's survey recently
include .blue, .pink and .black; these are all run by
Afilias, which also acts as the domain
registry for other well-established TLDs such as .info, .mobi.

The .paris geographic TLD has shown a promising start by
already reaching a total of 13,000 sites, outpacing growth seen by other new
GeoTLDs which reached general availability around the same time. The .paris
GeoTLD became available to all on 2 December 2014 and proclaims itself to be
the most affordable address in Paris.
The most visited .paris website is currently
www.toureiffel.paris, which is where
visitors will end up if they attempt to visit the Eiffel Tower's previous
website at www.tour-eiffel.fr.

In January, Google added support for the Google Domains beta directly into Blogger, making it easier for users to purchase custom domain names for their blogs. Google has been an ICANN accredited domain registrar since 2005, allowing it to sell domain names under the most popular top-level domains such as .com, .net and .org, but it is also in the process of making a much larger range of new gTLDs available to the public under its role as a registry.

Google Registry is operated by Charleston Road Registry Inc, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google. So far, it has launched three new TLDs: .みんな (which means "everyone" in Japanese), .soy (Spanish for "I am"), and most recently, .how.
Google's other successful applications for gTLDs include .zip, .eat, .foo, .meme, and .new, but these are not yet available to register.

Google applied for more than 100 new gTLDs in total, costing it over $18M in ICANN application fees. Some of these applications were subsequently withdrawn, such as that for .and, which was not allowed as it corresponds to the ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code for Andorra. Many of the gTLDs that Google applied for also had other applicants competing for ownership, including Amazon in 21 cases.

Google and Amazon were the only applicants for the .dev gTLD, but Amazon withdrew its application after an assumed private deal or auction. Despite .dev being used by private domain names in some corporate development environments, the risk of name collisions was evidently deemed to be low enough to allow Google's application to succeed.

Share:

In the January 2015 survey we received responses from
876,812,666 sites and 5,061,365 web-facing computers.

This is the lowest website count since last January, and the third month in a row
which has seen a significant drop in the total number of websites.
As was the case in the last two months, the loss was heavily concentrated at just
a few hosting companies, and a single IP address that was previously hosting parked
websites was responsible for over 50% of the drop.

Microsoft continues to be impacted most by the decline. Having overtaken Apache
in the July 2014
survey their market share now stands at just 27.5%, giving Apache a lead of more than 12
percentage points.

Microsoft's decline seems far less dramatic when looking at the number of
web-facing computers that use its server software. A net loss of 6,200 computers
this month resulted in its computer share falling by only 0.28 percentage points,
while Apache's went up by 0.18 to 47.5%.

These losses included many sites running on Microsoft IIS 6.0,
which along with Windows Server 2003, will reach the end of its Extended Support
period
in July. Further abandonment of these platforms is therefore expected in the
first half of this year, although Microsoft does offer custom support
relationships which go
beyond the Extended Support period.

Apache made an impressive gain of 22,000 web-facing computers this month. Half of this net growth can
be attributed to the Russian social networking company V Kontakte,
which hosts nearly 13,000 computers. Almost all of these were running nginx last month, but
11,000 have since defected to Apache, leaving less than 2,000 of V Kontakte's computers still using nginx.

OVH is still the second largest hosting company in terms of web-facing
computers (although DigitalOcean is hot on its heels), but demand for its own
relatively new .ovh top-level domain appears to
be waning. Last month, we reported that the number of sites using the new .ovh
TLD had shot up from 6,000 to 63,000. These sites were spread across just under
50,000 unique .ovh domains, and the number of domains grew by only 2,000 this month.

Only the first 50,000 .ovh domains were given away for free, while subsequent
ones were charged at EUR 0.99. Despite being less than a third of the planned
usual price of EUR 2.99, this shows how even a tiny cost can have a dramatic
impact on slowing down the uptake in domain registrations.

Other new top-level domains which have shown early signs of strong hostname
growth include .click, .restaurant,
.help, .property, .top,
.gifts, .quebec, .market and
.ooo, each of which were almost non-existent last month but now number in their thousands.

The proliferation of new top level domains is evidently generating a lot of
money for registrars and ICANN, but for some parties it has caused expenditure
that was previously unnecessary. Take the new
.hosting TLD for example: you would expect this domain
to only be of interest to hosting companies, but US bank Wells Fargo has also registered some
.hosting domains, including wellsfargo.hosting, wellsfargoadvisors.hosting and
wellsfargohomemortgage.hosting. These domains are not used to serve any content,
and instead redirect customers to Wells Fargo's main site at
wellsfargo.com. The sole purpose of
registering these domains appears to be to stop any other party from doing so,
which protects the bank's brand and prevents the domains being used to host
phishing sites.

In a similar move, Microsoft has also registered several .hosting domains
including xbox.hosting, bing.hosting, windows.hosting, skype.hosting, kinect.hosting and
dynamics.hosting. Browsing to any of these domains causes the user to be
redirected to bing.com, which displays search results for the second-level string
(i.e. "xbox", "windows", etc.).

Of course, with many other new TLDs continually popping up,
brand protection becomes an increasingly costly exercise. Microsoft has also recently registered
hundreds of other nonsensical domains which are used to redirect browsers to bing.com, such as
lumia.ninja, lync.lawyer, xboxone.guitars, windowsphone.futbol,
microsoft.airforce,
azure.luxury, yammer.singles, xboxlive.codes, halo.tattoo, internetexplorer.fishing, and so on.

However, the race to register domain names is not always won by Microsoft — bing.click is a prime example of a domain that someone else got to first. This domain is currently offered for sale, highlighting the fact that it's not just ICANN and the registrars that stand to gain money from the influx of new TLDs.

Share:

In the December 2014 survey we received responses from
915,780,262 sites and 5,034,578 web-facing computers.

This is the second month in a row where there has been a large drop in the
total number of websites, giving this month the lowest count since January.
As was the case in November, the loss has been concentrated at just a small number of hosting companies, with the ten largest drops accounting for over 52 million hostnames. The active sites and web facing computers metrics were not affected by the loss, with the sites involved being mostly advertising linkfarms, having very little unique content. The majority of these sites were running on Microsoft IIS, causing it to overtake Apache in the July 2014 survey. However the recent losses have resulted in its market share dropping to 29.8%, leaving it now over 10 percentage points behind Apache.

Despite losing more than six million hostnames this month, nginx outpaced all
other major server vendors by gaining 22,300 web-facing computers. nginx is now
used by nearly 11% of all web-facing computers – twice the share that it had two
years ago.

Overall, the total number of web-facing computers in our survey increased by just over 40,000 this month, making nginx responsible for more than half the increase. Despite an increase of over 11,000 computers for Apache, and 1,700 for IIS, both continue to lose market share.

Thanks to continued strong growth at Amazon
Web Services, Amazon is the largest hosting company by a considerable
margin in terms of our web-facing computers metric (which includes web-facing virtual machines, providing that each has its own kernel and IP address). With nearly 300,000 web-facing computers
in total, Amazon has just over twice as many as second-place
OVH. In October, we reported that
DigitalOcean had become the
4th largest hosting company in under 2 years, but it quickly reached third
place in November and is continuing to close the gap on OVH.

Cloud growth

Both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure expanded their cloud hosting
footprints recently. Amazon opened a new European AWS region in
Frankfurt,
which augments its existing EU region in Ireland. Besides being able to host
services closer to the center of Europe, the new region means that customers can
now build multi-region applications with the assurance that their data will stay
within the EU. The new Frankfurt region houses two EC2 availability zones and
three AWS edge locations.

Microsoft's new Azure "geo" is in
Australia, and
consists of two geographically redundant regions in New South Wales and
Victoria. This will help Microsoft to compete with Amazon's two EC2 availability zones
in Sydney.

New TLDs

More new top-level domains showing strong growth in this month's survey
include .nyc, which is targeted for use by New
Yorkers, and .realtor, which is only allowed
to be used by members of the National Association of Realtors or the Canadian
Real Estate Association. These have grown from virtually nothing to a total of
40,000 and 80,000 sites respectively.

Ironically, one of this month's fastest growing new top-level domains started
off as an April Fool's Day joke
in 2009, when the founder of OVH announced the creation of the .ovh TLD – years
before such things were actually possible. This joke resulted in over 22,000 requests to
register .ovh domains within a few hours, demonstrating the potential demand for
such domains. OVH eventually entered into a
Registry
Agreement with ICANN in January 2014, and the sunrise period for the .ovh
TLD began in September. This month's survey saw the number of sites using .ovh
domains grow from 6,000 to 63,000, likely due to the first 50,000 .ovh domains
being given away for free, and with subsequent growth being fuelled by
attractive pricing: new .ovh domains can currently be registered for only EUR
0.99 per year and renewed for EUR 1.99.

Share:

In the November 2014 survey we received responses from 947,029,805 sites and 4,994,577 web-facing computers.

Despite the dramatic loss of almost 82 million sites since October, the number of web-facing computers increased by over 23 thousand (+0.47%) this month. Automatically generated content and wildcard sites are often used for activities such as domain holding and search-engine results manipulation, where the majority of the sites will not receive human visitors and therefore the resources required to run the sites are minimal. This is clearly demonstrated this month, with over half of the net loss of sites being attributed to a single IP address that was previously hosting parked websites.

The most significant contributor to the increase in web-facing computers was nginx, with almost 16k more computers using the web server this month. Apache and Microsoft both experienced small losses in market share as a result, continuing the trend seen over the past few years.

nginx gained a number of notable high-traffic websites in this month's survey.
After several years of using lighttpd, the SourceForge download site
(downloads.sourceforge.net, traffic rank #411)
has switched to nginx, and gaming news site pcgamer.com
(#1339) has also started using nginx with Rackspace's
Cloud Load Balancing as a Service product.

Amongst the top million websites, Apache's market share has continued its slow decline.
Ever since Netcraft started publishing these figures, Apache has commanded more than half of this
market sector. This month, however, Apache has reached its lowest market share ever: 50.01%. Although it still clings
on to more than half of the market this month, it looks unlikely to retain it for long.
Microsoft and Google have also been losing share amongst the top million sites, all making
room for nginx, which has muscled its way up to 20.4%.

New top level domains are continuing to add a modest number of sites to the survey
each month. One of this month's
fastest growing new TLDs is .audio,
which is run by Uniregistry, where it is pitched
as a dedicated online space for sound, musicians, engineers and producers.
More than 17,000 sites are already using this TLD.

German states and cities are also contributing to the growth in new TLDs. For example,
.koeln is now used by 14,000 sites, and
.bayern is
already used by more than 10,000 websites since it entered general availability on 30 September 2014.

Just in time for this year's Black Friday events on November 28th, the
.blackfriday TLD was also launched recently by Uniregistry. More than 10,000 sites have adopted this
domain in the space of a month, including amazon.blackfriday and target.blackfriday, which redirect to each company's main US website.
Uniregistry also provides another seasonal TLD, .christmas,
which was found to be used by 12,000 sites in this month's survey.

NCC Group released its 124-page
.trust Technical Policy [pdf]
last month, which outlines a stringent set of criteria which must be met by registrants of .trust domains.
Many of these policies relate to security, dictating both what must and must not be done – the table of contents alone contains 71 instances of "Do not".
The policies go far beyond the typical fraud prevention requirements set by most other registries, with a heavy emphasis on web application security. For example,
websites which use .trust domains must serve all content over an encrypted HTTPS connection, must not use inline JavaScript or the eval() function, must provide an appropriate Content Security Policy header, and must be free from open redirects.

NCC Group bought the .trust TLD earlier this year from Deutsche Post, which had originally obtained it
from ICANN in 2013. With NCC Group claiming that security compliance is externally verifiable,
it anticipates that all sites using the .trust TLD will be recognised as trustworthy.

Share:

In the October 2014 survey we received responses from 1,028,932,208 sites,
which is nearly six million more than last month.

Apache regains the lead

Microsoft lost the lead to Apache this month, as the two giants continue to battle closely for the largest
share of all websites. Apache gained nearly 30 million sites, while Microsoft lost 22 million, causing Apache to be thrust back into
the lead by more than 36 million sites. In total, 385 million sites are now powered by Apache, giving it a
37.45% share of the market.

A significant contributor to this change was the expiry of domains previously used for link farming on Microsoft IIS servers. The domains used by these link farms were acquired and the sites are now hosted on Apache servers at Confluence-Networks, which display Network Solutions parking notices.

A new major release in the Apache 2.2 legacy branch was announced on 3 September. Apache 2.2.29
also incorporates many changes — including several security fixes — from version
2.2.28, which was not officially released.
New versions of nginx stable and
mainline were also released during September,
which included fixes for an SSL session reuse vulnerability, plus several other bugfixes.

Top million sites

The million busiest
websites now represent less than 0.1% of all websites in the survey, but provide an
insight into the preferences amongst the sites which are responsible for the great majority
of today's web traffic.

Just over half (50.2%) of the top million sites use Apache, which is very similar to its
share amongst all active sites; however, nginx's market share is skewed noticeably higher amongst the top million
sites, where it powers 20.3% of sites, compared with only 14.3% of all active sites.

Computer growth

The most stable metric is the market share of web-facing computers — hundreds of thousands of websites can easily be served from a single computer (and subsequently disappear all in one go) but it is obviously far less trivial and less desirable to deploy or decommission a significant number of computers. Netcraft's survey is also able to identify distinct computers which use multiple web-facing IP addresses, which adds further stability.

Apache leads in this market with a 47.5% share, and Microsoft also performs well with 30.7%, but both have been gradually falling over the past few years as a result of nginx's strong growth. nginx gained more than 17,000 additional web-facing computers this month, helping to bring its market share up to 10.3%.

New top level domains

The relatively new .xyz domain, which showed tremendous growth over the past
couple of months, has started to flatten out slightly after gaining only 33,000 sites this month (+8%).
Nonetheless, this is still quite a healthy gain, albeit notably less than last month's growth
of 177,000 hostnames which then boosted its total by 78%.

Other promising TLDs include .london, .hamburg and .公司,
each of which had fewer than 50 sites in last month's survey, but now have 17,000, 11,000 and 10,000
sites respectively.

The internationalised .公司 (.xn--55qx5d) TLD is delegated to the Computer Network Information Center of Chinese
Academy of Sciences. It means "company", making it the Chinese equivalent of .com.

Share:

In the September 2014 survey we received responses from 1,022,954,603
sites — nearly 31 million more than last month.

More than a billion websites

This is the first time the survey has exceeded a billion websites,
a milestone achievement that was unimaginable two decades ago.

Netcraft's first ever survey was carried out over 19 years ago in August 1995. That survey
found only 18,957 sites, although the first significant milestone of one million sites was reached
in less than two years, by April 1997.

Fuelled by the dot-com bubble between 1997 and 2000, the survey reached nearly 10 million sites
by the start of 2000. The active sites metric was added to our survey shortly afterwards, immediately showing that a significant proportion of websites were automatically generated, displaying identical tag structures, and used for activities such as holding pages, typo-squatting advertising providers, speculative domain registrants, and search-engine optimisation companies.

Rapid hostname growth has continued ever since, with the number of active sites increasing at a far gentler rate. Just under half of the hostnames in our June 2000 survey were active sites, whereas today, less than one in five are active — 178 million active sites in total.

Microsoft, Apache, and nginx

Microsoft and Apache currently take the lion's share of the web server market (just over 71% combined), while Microsoft edged into the lead for the first time in July 2014. Nginx has been steadily gaining share over the last 7 years, and is now used to serve just over 14% of all hostnames.

The view by number of active sites is very different, however. While Microsoft has seen a rapid growth in their hostname market share of around 20 percentage points since September 2011, there has been almost no change in their share of the active sites in this time. Nginx overtook Microsoft in terms of active sites in 2012, and today has a market share of 14.5% – more than 2 points ahead of Microsoft, whose web server software is used by only 11.9% of active sites. However, Apache truly dominates this market, with more than half of all active sites choosing to use Apache software.

Recently nginx has been seeing even greater gains in terms of web facing computers, doubling their market share in the last 2 years to just over 10% this month. Apache and Microsoft are continuing to experience increases in their number of web facing computers, however the growth is often far smaller than that of nginx. This month they gained just 323 and 414 computers respectively, compared to an increase of over 17k for nginx.

New top level domains

Dozens of new TLDs were added to the Root Zone during this month's survey, including
.deals, .healthcare, .realtor,
.auction, .yandex, .city
and .lgbt. Recent additions which have now started to experience growth in the survey include .media, .services, .reisen, .pictures, .exchange and .toys.
Each of these TLDs had only
two or three sites last month, but all are now in their thousands.

The .xyz domain, which we mentioned last month, has outpaced all of the other new gTLDs after a Network Solutions promotion offering a free matching .xyz domain with each .com domain purchased. This month an additional 177,000 hostnames were found under this TLD,
bringing the total number of .xyz sites up by 78% to 403,000.
Even faster growth was seen among the
.中国 (xn--fiqs8s)
internationalised domain name for China, which grew by 181% to a total of 73,000 sites.